I love Daryl Cunningham’s life of Ayn Rand! I read up to the beginning of the affair with Nathan a while back and had to stop because there wasn’t any more. Thanks for this reminder that there’s still a whole downward spiral of downward spirals still to go.

My chum and all-round good egg Darryl Cunningham drew this. Please go check out his books ‘Psychiatric Tales’ and ‘Science Tales: Lies, Hoaxes and Scams’. He’s not a wealthy man and could do with the sales.

The problem some writers have is that they take creating their own reality beyond the confines of fiction. L. Ron Hubbard went into the religion business with Scientology, while Rand opted for bogus Objectivist philosophy. Both fail to pass a reality check.

My chum and all-round good egg Darryl Cunningham drew this. Please go check out his books ‘Psychiatric Tales’ and ‘Science Tales: Lies, Hoaxes and Scams’. He’s not a wealthy man and could do with the sales.

My father died of lung cancer. I honestly wouldn’t wish that on even as nasty a person as Ayn Rand. That said, I can sort of understand PZ’s final comment, especially given the odes to cigarettes in her books, and that she reportedly would kick people out of her inner circle if they refused to take up smoking.

Actually in many respects Ayn Rand was a Stalinist. Her attitude towards the Native Americans was that they had failed to use the land properly in a progressive manner. I.E., inaugurate Industrial Capitalism and so of course could be conquered and dispossessed by those who would use the land properly. In other words Europeans.

Thus stomping on people in order for “progress” to happen was right and good and there was only one right and proper way to use the land.

So much for being anti-coercion and so much for people having the right to dispose of their property has they see fit.

Frankly progressives display a double standard regarding public health. They scold the population for smoking, but they make life easy for promiscuous gay men because gay men tend to vote Democratic. And from the perspective of epidemiology, the dispensation given to a group which travels the world and engages in exchanges of bodily fluids with strangers makes no sense at all.

The Rand phenomenon drives progressives nuts because it demonstrates progessives’ inability to control the human mind, despite their strongholds in education, Hollywood, academia and government. Ayn Rand, an otherwise obscure immigrant, managed to inject a set of ideas into the culture which progressive central planning didn’t order, which interferes with progressive political goals, and which progressives simply can’t get rid of. In fact, every attack on her philosophy just draws more attention to it from people who might not have otherwise looked into it.

Rand certainly sounds nutty and confused in some ways, I admit. But she must have gotten a few nontrivial things right for progressives to feel so threatened by it.

Not to mention the cult of personality that surrounded her (and still surrounds her miserable books). It’s a philosophy that seems to be designed to be an exact mirror of Stalinism that will inevitably produce the same outcome. Look at the U.S. today, with its crumbling infrastructure and slowly declining wages as laws and regulations are removed that help enrich the already wealthy, with the Randians still claiming the way to prosperity is to reduce or eliminate still more taxes and regulations. We’ve achieved Ayn’s dystopia by following her recommendations for building a utopia. Perhaps we can try something different now (perhaps by starting with the premise that there are no easy and universal solutions to diverse and complex problems).

I’m a bit disappointed that the author left out the part where Ayn Rand literally hero-worshipped a child-murdering sociopath. Oh well. Very well done altogether though. I felt bad for poor old Frank O’Conner.

They scold the population for smoking, but they make life easy for promiscuous gay men because gay men tend to vote Democratic.

I know right? My mother, a lifelong smoker? Totally was denied to the right to marry my lifelong smoker dad. And I’m SO tired of the fact that my gay co-workers can fuck each others brains out right next to my desk, but the smokers have to go outside. Stupid Obama!

And then Rand ran to the government she hated so much for money because her trashy books weren’t paying the medial bills.

@1 – And like the christians she despised, she rationalized her taking from the people as not really being against her philosophy after all.

@18 – Ayn Rand got famous for only one reason. She created a philosophy that the rich loved. They could continue to be selfish and then point to a “philosopher” that said that not only was it okay, but it was actually good for all of humankind in some way that couldn’t really be demonstrated, but dang it sounds great that being a selfish bastard is good (somehow). Other than posts like this that pop up from time to time, no one I know gives Ayn Rand a second thought except to chuckle that people did (and still do) think she had a workable philosophy.

Ayn Rand was misguidedly idealistic and plain crazy, everyone knows that. Nonetheless, her work contains interesting and unique ideas, some less relevant to reality than others. You can say she was a bad writer, that she was evil, that she fostered generations of intellectual hubris, or whatever. She still made a real, if bizarre, contribution to the sum of human philosophy or literature or whatever you want to call it. Her books are worth reading if you want to experience a point of view you won’t find anywhere else, provided of course you’re not naive enough to internalise what you find.

What I’m trying to say is that bashing Ayn Rand just because pseudo-intellectuals regurgitate her ideas is like beating a leperous albino crocodile just because it’s worshipped by the tribe of savages who brutally murdered your uncle. It doesn’t achieve anything because Rand/the crocodile weren’t dangerous in the first place – the pseudo-ints/savages would’ve been crazy even without their object of worship. All you end up doing is dishonouring a repulsive but undeniably unique entity that never meant to cause you any harm.

All you end up doing is dishonouring a repulsive but undeniably unique entity that never meant to cause you any harm.

You mean she didn’t have the power to cause any harm, though if her policies were in effect it certainly would be incredibly harmful. She wanted to harm us (all of society, really), she just couldn’t, or hasn’t been able to yet. Whether or not her intent is to harm (she obviously thinks it’s the right way to live), that doesn’t matter. She is already harmful because people have listened to her and followed her ideas. The people that follow her ideas certainly want the power to cause harm and we are certainly not wrong in bringing down their beloved mascot. She’s the symbol they all rally around and promote. She HAS to be brought down with criticism.

@30
I’m not arguing against criticism of her ideas. I’m against the largely ad hominem attacks you can find here against her ideas (e.g. the comic explaining how her sad life made her into the person who made those horrible ideas – not to say that I didn’t enjoy the comic heheh). I would argue that she wasn’t an evil person – her ideas were meant (by her) to help people achieve their potential and ultimately be happy. Of course, her ideas have been laid low by criticism time and time again, and rightly so. Despite that, she (and her ideas) should be remembered as unique and interesting, but ultimately flawed, rather than evil and wrong.

I’m not sure saying that her sad life made her into the person who had those ideas is an ad hominem attack — that’s just biography. The argument that her ideas are horrible stands on its own merits and has been made many times. Her ideas aren’t evil because she was a malevolent person; they’re evil because they’re harmful when implemented. And unfortunately at our present moment in time it’s not possible to disentangle the critique of the disastrous practical legacy of her ideas from their academic interest as a possible failure mode of human philosophy.

Unique, interesting, flawed, evil, illogical, and wrong is a completely plausible combination of attributes for a single thing, and my impression is that all of them describe Ayn Rand’s ideas pretty well.

@37
I agree that they were wrong in the sense that they were untrue and not good for describing reality or anything like that. I disagree that they were wrong in the sense related to ‘evil’ i.e. that they are inherently bad and that she was wrong to create them.

Nimbus0#40
They’re evil in that when implemented they cause great harm. This makes them inherently bad; they have no redeeming features, no upsides, no good points. Just malevolent lies, which are hardly unique.

She still made a real, if bizarre, contribution to the sum of human philosophy or literature or whatever you want to call it.

Like what?

And pick one: philosophy or literature (or even something else), not “whatever.” Abject failure in either case, but I’d like to know what exactly you think this is about.

On other other hand, if you do actually want to claim she made a real contribution to “whatever,” then I guess I can accept that. “Whatever” has surely had its landscape (if that’s what you call it) substantially changed, if perhaps bizarrely, since her doing whatever it is she might have done. Some deep thoughts right there, nimbus0. Rand would be proud.

What I’m trying to say is that bashing Ayn Rand just because pseudo-intellectuals regurgitate her ideas is like beating a leperous albino crocodile just because it’s worshipped by the tribe of savages who brutally murdered your uncle.

She was a pseudo-intellectual herself, so your analogy fails. Hard.

That’s before we even get to the racist implications of “the tribe of savages,” but maybe concepts or language just aren’t your thing, the way it is for people in philosophy or literature … or whatever.

All you end up doing is dishonouring a repulsive but undeniably unique entity that never meant to cause you any harm.

She “dishonored” her fucking self. Read and listen to the shit she fucking said. It’s fucking harmful, whether or not she meant it to be harmful. And I don’t see evidence that you’ve read her mind. So you find a way to do that, then make your claim that she didn’t mean it, as if that fucking matters.

What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. -Ayn Rand Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 61

and then attacked it. We’re supposed to be impressed by her “thoughts”?

I agree that they were wrong in the sense that they were untrue and not good for describing reality or anything like that. I disagree that they were wrong in the sense related to ‘evil’ i.e. that they are inherently bad and that she was wrong to create them.

Her ideas aren’t evil because she was a malevolent person; they’re evil because they’re harmful when implemented.

I think even when they’re not implemented, the fact that they are respected by some does contribute to the overall political atmosphere, and not in particularly healthy ways.

It’s essentially an Overton window argument. Rand and objectivism create a whole ‘rapacious capitalism is justified because otherwise individual rights to create are suppressed, really, oh horrors’ space that otherwise might not as much be there. She tries to make de facto robber barons heroes. She fails, with most of us, but those she convinces do still vote, on occasion. And write letters to the editor, and so on. Her general demonization of those in need, and those, even, who would be so craven as actually to try to help them probably does contribute to that particular stream you find throughout economic and political discourse. It would be there, anyway, to some degree, sure, you can generally expect–and the critics who pointed out the fascist overtones in Atlas Shrugged could probably tell you how, in fact, authoritarian regimes of that stripe generally do also demonize ‘the mentally defective’ and ‘the criminal’ and ‘the lazy’ as a plague ensuring the downfall of society, and were doing so well before Rand got published. But Rand generates another set of excuses–or, really, pretty much the same excuses with a slightly different packaging.

It’s a broad strokes criticism, but it’s really, I’ve always figured, some mangled committment to ‘purity’ makes the mess she made. She takes directions and notions which in moderation might not be bad advice, and seems to figure what’s good medicine by the tablespoon and mixed with other critical ingredients, well, it should logically be way better if refined to perfect chemical purity and then forcibly piled on by the metric tonne with a dump truck. As in: yes, we do want and need individual rights even within larger groups; ruling these out entirely does make miseries. But demanding groups abrogate individual rights not at all is simply not practical; in practice, her view of how you’d do this comes out to an argument for predation by a single dominant actor; provided he acts alone for, apparently, the sake of ‘creating’, no one else may even organize or cooperate to stand up to him. Likewise, yes, actually, sometimes it serves an artist or inventor to say entirely to hell with what anyone else thinks; I’m doing my own thing, and in this fashion, new ground may indeed be broken. But art is also communication and communion, and technologies generally act on more than their supposedly necessarily singular creator, so being actually requirednever to care what anyone else makes of the products of your creativity, is, well, pointlessly and arbitrarily limiting at best, potentially actively sociopathic at worst.

I think what’s also scary about Rand is how oddly seductive it has proven to be, to some. Possibly even to those whose seduction poses larger societies some of the greatest risks. The privileged and wealthy are given a justification for keeping whatever they get, walling themselves off from an apparently dangerous, grasping underclass; the already narcissistic and self-centered told go ahead, listen to no one else, do your thing, anyone challenging you or criticizing your vision is just a no-talent leech and you’ve no need for those miserable failures who are surely merely jealous of your glorious creative radiance…

So Ayn, seriously, brilliantly done… And just so long as you’re at it, could you perhaps also hand every arsonist a jerry can full of gasoline, and some matches, and assure them in stilted poetry and lengthy speeches by men in suits behind podiums that all fire is a cleansing and beautiful thing? Thanks awfully.

I would argue that [they weren’t] evil [people] – [their] ideas were meant (by [them]) to help people achieve their potential and ultimately be happy. Of course, [their] ideas have been laid low by criticism time and time again, and rightly so. Despite that, [they] (and [their] ideas) should be remembered as unique and interesting, but ultimately flawed, rather than evil and wrong.

So, just out of interest, do you guys think that [The Bible] should be censored? Should [The Bible] exist in public libraries, or be discussed in university subjects?

Ya know, there’s nothing inherently EVIL about a racist system, it just turns out to beimpractical if your goal is making everyone happy.

But it’s not like morally wrong or nothin’.
No!

My parents had alternative ideas about child-raising, like – not being there, not providing food, that kinda thing.
But that didn’t make them BAD parents, they just tried a failed parenting experiment.

Indeed. It can serve a very important role in society as a warning to others: Taking someone else’s simple answers to complex problems that had tragic consequences, and inverting them doesn’t make them magically right (or lacking the same tragic consequences).

Meh. A comic should be funny, or informative, or make the reader think. If it’s nothing more insightful than ‘Rand was a bit annoying but basically I agree with libertarianism so critics should calm down’ then what’s the point…

Rand influenced Greenspan. Greenspan basically set the stage for the economy to crash.

Don’t tell me Rand’s ideas haven’t harmed anyone.

-This strongly reminds me of the ‘Stalin was an atheist, therefore atheism hurts people’ canard. And isn’t there a character in Atlas Shrugged (Robert Stadler) with uncanny resemblance to whom Greenspan later came to be?

-You haven’t read the book. Rand makes it explicit that those in Galt’s Gulch have to do menial labor they have never done for most of the rest of their lives and fully understand that they are poorer than they were in the outside world.

Very interesting and a nice read.
I knew there was a ton of personal drama, cultish nonsense and bullying and the like in Rand’s story, but I didn’t know too much about the various people actually involved. Looking forward to more pages.

Interesting point about Rand being a Stalinist. Her family was persecuted during the Bolshevick revolution and later when their business (a pharmacy) was nationalized and they also starved. So she can really be seen as a trauma victim, and according to trauma theory victims tend to grow up to enact one of the three roles in the trauma triad: victim, perpetrator, onlooker.

I don’t know whether psychologists would apply this to someone witnessing a geopolitical trauma, but it would seem to apply here.

I really look forward to the day when “authoritarian personality” is considered a recognized psychological malady.

-This strongly reminds me of the ‘Stalin was an atheist, therefore atheism hurts people’ canard. And isn’t there a character in Atlas Shrugged (Robert Stadler) with uncanny resemblance to whom Greenspan later came to be?

Except, of course, that Stalinism is not applied atheism, while our current societal mess is largely due to applied Randism.

I found this an interesting and exceptionally fair take on Rand. Certainly it comes from the point of view of a person who rejects Objectivism, but it really does try to paint a fair portrait, I think. If there’s any ad hominem in this comic it’s targeted at Greenspan, the only person in here active in recent political events. And I think it’s worth understanding what kind of ideology is driving a person who has had powerful effects on our economy and government policy of late and is at least partially responsible for where we find ourselves now.

I’m disappointed that the author left out the part where Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and welfare queen: she denounced government assistance and yet, after being diagnosed with lung cancer, she secretly received Social Security and Medicare payments under the alias Ann O’Connor (her husband was Frank O’Connor). It calls into question just how much Ayn Rand really believed in Objectivism – or if Objectivism is truly liveable.

All you end up doing is dishonouring a repulsive but undeniably unique entity that never meant to cause you any harm.

Her characters sure do. In Atlas Shrugged, it’s said that Nat Taggart murders a state legislator. He also tosses a person who offers him a government loan down three flights of fucking stairs.

This isn’t just limited to government cronies either. In The Fountainhead, Gail Wynand tosses one of his own workers down two flights of stairs and has his ankle broken for…telling Wynand not to get huffy.

The main character, Howard Roark, also rapes a woman while working in a granite quarry.

This is just her fiction. Her views on war are probably her most vile, which is saying a lot. Seriously, look at this:

“This is a major reason people should be concerned about the nature of their government. The majority in any country at war is often innocent. But if by neglect, ignorance, or helplessness, they couldn’t overthrow their bad government and establish a better one, then they must pay the price for the sins of their government, as we are all paying for the sins of ours. And if people put up with dictatorship—as some do in Soviet Russia, and some did in Nazi Germany—they deserve what their government deserves. Our only concern should be who started the war. Once that’s established, there’s no need to consider the “rights” of that country, because it has initiated the use of force and therefore stepped outside the principle of rights.”

along with

“We are responsible for the government we have, and that is why it is important to take the science of politics very seriously. If we become a dictatorship, and a freer country attacks us, it would be their right.”

So she never meant to cause any harm, except that if a war ever breaks out and turns south, the winning country can do…pretty much anything it wants to you by those guidelines. If we take the rhetoric that the right spews to its fullest, incidentally, by Ayn Rand’s view a country like Somalia could invade the U.S., it would be their right, and the citizens there would be utterly fucked.

I’m disappointed that the author left out the part where Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and welfare queen: she denounced government assistance and yet, after being diagnosed with lung cancer, she secretly received Social Security and Medicare payments under the alias Ann O’Connor (her husband was Frank O’Connor).

I could swear that the comic does get into her getting Medicare, though the bit about the alias.

I would agree with Nimbus insofar as noting that Rand asked a lot of good questions and had reasonable stated goals: Do humans need a philosophy and what sort should they have? Their philosophy should be rational, based on their nature, and not based on whims or force. People should strive to be productive, etc. Pretty safe ground there.

The problem was that her answers were for shit: she had no understanding (admittedly) of human psychology, didn’t seem to grasp at all that we are interdependent social beings, more like ants than tigers, had little appreciation for science or culture (ie humanity’s accumulated knowledge prior to her existence), and worst of all, irritatingly went through all sorts of mental gymnastics to rationalize her personal peccadilloes into lofty philosophical truths. Her meanderings on smoking are embarrassing, even compared to some of her other nonpolitical commentary.

She acted as though she were the font of all knowledge, sprung fully formed from the head of Aristotle. In reality, she was more like a clueless Dr. Frankenstein, wanting to improve the world, but having no idea what she was doing, created instead a monster that is consuming the world. The current government shutdown is Objectivism realized.

More in the annals of libertarian consistency: Nick Gillespie of Reason (yeah, seriously) arguing that the problem with the current US government (or lack thereof) is that Obama isn’t tyrannical enough.

I’m disappointed that the author left out the part where Ayn Rand was a hypocrite and welfare queen:

As someone who’s been homeless and still struggling on welfare, I really, really hate that phrase. I don’t care who it’s attached too. Welfare queens, as the repubs have dubbed and the meme perpetuates, do not exist.

I would agree with Nimbus insofar as noting that Rand asked a lot of good questions and had reasonable stated goals: Do humans need a philosophy and what sort should they have? Their philosophy should be rational, based on their nature, and not based on whims or force. People should strive to be productive, etc. Pretty safe ground there.

I see no reason to credit Rand for what is either trivial, or retreaded ground.

Greenspan applied the “regulations bad; government evil; selfishness good” part of Randian thinking, which is, as far as I can tell, the main thing that libertarians are on about. Not sure what speeches by individual characters has to do with whether a.) Greenspan was heavily influenced by Rand and b.) whether those influences are part of what caused Greenspan to make all those horrible decisions that eventually led to the Great Recession.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia.

No.
Next!

Also from the site:

The Myth of Catastrophic Global Warming

But, hey, maybe that was just an off day, right?

The reason that that ‘money speech’ differs from typical Libertarian thought is that Libertarian thought is often callous, privileged and repulsive, but has at least the veneer of consistency. The speech declaims that a country cannot go on half-rich and half-poor (apparently having missed, oh I dunno, pretty much all of human history), but then talks about ‘looters’ who crawl from under their rocks to swarm upon the self-effacing wealthy.
If a nation divided into rich and poor cannot survive, who are these ‘looters’?
Not the poor, surely, who would not exist in the Utopia described… perhaps they live beneath well-appointed, comfortable rocks.

The speech talks about things produced by the labor of brutes.
What brutes?
The rich, who deserve their wealth?
The poor, who will not exist in a good society run by (one presumes) the rich?

And this:

But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it.

Whew!
I was afraid – just for a second there – that wealthy scoundrels might exist!
Thank goodness – now all I have to do to see if someone is a good person is check if their net worth has remained above average for a decade or so.
I was concerned that looters might get wealthy in some way – hey, yanno I was just reading a speech that said…
Oh, wait…

You know this did give me an idea for a potential D&D or style campaign. One where a God like Hermes is actually on the ball and makes sure wealth is attracted to virtue. Things would look very different

You know this did give me an idea for a potential D&D or style campaign. One where a God like Hermes is actually on the ball and makes sure wealth is attracted to virtue. Things would look very different

Would paladins still have to tithe 90% of their income? That could get frustrating.